IT Students Contract Out Coursework To India

An anonymous reader writes "Students studying computing in the UK and US are outsourcing their university coursework to graduates in India and Romania. Work is being contracted out for as little as £5 on contract coding websites usually used by businesses. Students are outsourcing everything from simple coursework to full blown final year dissertations. It's causing a major headache for lecturers who say it is almost impossible to detect." The irony, of course, is that if they actually get jobs in the sector, this will be how they actually work anyway.

Want proof?!

[wmbetts]

See it in action! http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Agetafreelancer.com+%22homework%22&btnG=Google+Search [google.com]

Re:An excellent argument...

[AmIAnAi]

This is an excellent argument for the practical interview; instead of just asking questions, have somebody actually show you what they know.

I recently interviewed a couple of Masters graduates who both claimed to be profficient in C. Their accademic background and work experience gave no reason to doubt this. However, when confronted with a practical test, both made fundamental errors and struggled with the more complicated questions.

Not a good idea

[Zelocka]

Anyone in the IT field that has dealt with outsourced code knows that it's generally buggy and poorly written and requires a lot of debug time on the company side. It's not likely that annoying college students are going to get good quality especially since they likely won't know the difference if they are using a service like that anyway.

I guess outsourcing would generally work for simple assignments, but frankly it would take more time to find someone to do it then it would to do most coding assignments in the first place. Add to that the fact that you will have tests on the subject both in class and in interviews so doing this is not a good move long term anyway.

Now if it was English papers...

Re:good!

[mikael]

Our final year assignments were based upon writing device drivers for bits of hardware (network cards, stepper motors, analog sensors), and writing multi-threaded applications (eg. heart-rate monitor system - thread 1 read data in from the sensor, thread 2 displayed the graph, thread 3 performed critical levels checking/alarm, thread 4 maintained an event log).

Since work could only take place in that room on a dedicated trusted server, and the students had to leave the work in a particular directory, it would be hard for any student to outsource the work.

Rent A Coder, anyone?

[BradleyAndersen]

I used to do work on Rent A Coder, till I couldn't compete anymore. 5 years ago, you could get good money for writing simple projects for people (I didn't ask what the projects were for ;) ... now programmers abroad are doing the same coding for about 10 times less cost (my non-scientific observations on my project bids) than I can. This thing has been around a long time.

It's self-correcting....

[King_TJ]

Home-grown talent that cheated their way into jobs either A) gets frustrated by their poor performance reviews and inability to succeed in their chosen field, and gets out, or B) actually learns to be competent over time (at the expense of whoever the sucker was who employed them first).

I saw a lot of both A and B over the years, even with a few buddies of mine.

EG. I once knew a guy who was pretty much your stereotypical "happy, go lucky, wanna-be beach bum" type. He got into I.T. as an entry-level coder using relatively high-level programming tools like "Powerbuilder". All he really did was minor code maintenance (such as, "Please change things so the clock time is displayed here, instead of here, on our screens"). He wound up scoring a support job at Oracle, earning at least 3x his former pay, with no real Oracle experience, all because he crash-course studied the thing for like 2 weeks after finding out he had an interview scheduled. Only REAL reason he wanted that job? He got to re-locate to Colorado, where he wanted to ski really badly. But his friendly personality and willingness to "cram" to know "just enough" to get by in a given situation got him through.....

They are only hurting themselves..

[cryptodan]

because when they actually doing work related to their degrees they will not know the material and thusly will get fired. Its better to do the work yourself then pay someone else to do it.

Re:And business will adapt ...

[baggins2001]

I don't know why everybody thinks that this is a recent problem. This has been going on at least since 99.
And at some of the major schools in the land. There were at least 2 schools in the North East where this was happening at that time.
We hired one, knowing full well he had engaged in this practice. We didn't care. We were outsourcing our work back then, not because it was cheaper, but because it was the easiest way to find people at the time.
There have always been group projects in school where people could skate through. This was going on back in the 80's.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[Red Flayer]

Why? Because inflation is keyed to minimum wage.

That's a myth.

Even the Cato institute doesn't buy cost-push inflation [cato.org]:

Some opponents of the minimum wage argue that it aggravates inflation by pushing up the costs of individual businesses. [4] Those businesses, unwilling or unable to absorb such costs, pass them on to consumers in the form of higher prices. In this view, any artificial increase in labor costs can produce so-called cost-push inflation.

There are several problems with the notion of cost-push inflation. The primary error in this analysis is that it confuses a shift in the structure of relative prices with a general rise in the level of prices. If the labor costs of businesses are increased and they succeed in passing on the costs to consumers in the form of higher prices, they will have managed to change the structure of relative prices at the expense of businesses that are unable to raise their prices because of more-intense competition. This is quite distinct from a general increase in the level of prices, which would be possible only if the real supply of money was increased.

Many firms, however, may be unable to pass on their increased costs to consumers. It is consumers who ultimately determine the price of any good on the market, and they may decide that a business's product is not worth a higher price. Producers cannot force consumers to buy what they produce, and businesses cannot always arbitrarily increase the prices of their products simply because the government has arbitrarily increased their costs.

This fact has important implications. If a business cannot simply pass along its new labor costs, it must somehow absorb them--by eliminating workers rendered unproductive by the new minimum wage, by replacing labor with more-productive machines, or by cutting back production. Those jobs not eliminated will be more demanding, as employers will use fewer people to produce the same amount of work.

Re:Thank minimum wage

[robthebloke]

Well, I've personally recieved e-mails from students asking for help from the UK, US, Spain and pakistan to name but a few. I actually submitted some of the funnier ones here [thedailywtf.com]

Re:An excellent argument...

[Ahnteis]

>>So the moral of the story is, if the chair of the dept is teaching one of your courses, no matter how stupid you think he is, or his teaching ability, or how easy the course work is, attend every frikin' calls, smile, kiss ass, and don't do anything to get his ire, as you may regret it down the line.

This moral translates well into many careers! :)

Re:Thank minimum wage

[WhiteHorse-The Origi]

In Asia, plagiarism is common. It is a HUGE problem. I bet most University graduates in Asia plagiarized their thesis and other work. It's sooo obvious, just look at their publications and read their books. It's like they just took someone else's book and shuffled the chapters, changing a few words here and there. They submit it, it passes the automated plagiarism detector, and poof! they're a goddam genius!!! PhD! Woo!

Then you ask them a simple question that's in their field and they have no clue. But you said in your thesis... Or What was your thesis about?

From what I gather, many of these students go to US universities, get their degrees there and come back to Asia and make top dollar. The universities just turn a blind eye and take as much money as possible. It's sad but true.